HOWARD, Wis. (WFRV) – On Monday night, village of Howard trustees didn’t vote on a deer management program that had originally appeared on their agenda as an action item.
A village trustee told Local 5 News that officials made several changes to the original deer management program proposal. He said there wasn’t enough time to inform the public of the changes, so they’ll wait until a board meeting later this month to vote on this.
The village trustee said one of the major changes is potentially increasing the number of places in the village where hunters could hunt deer.
The village of Howard has a large deer population and many residents feel like village officials need to take significant steps to address the problem. In off-camera conversations, residents told Local 5 News the deer are everywhere in the village and pose a safety hazard when they’re crossing busy roads. Some residents said deer are also unsanitary and leave their droppings all over their yards and neighborhoods.
One woman told Local 5 News that she’s tried to use deer spray on her plants and this hasn’t worked either. Another resident said that for those with vegetable gardens, they don’t like spraying them with chemicals, making the unsprayed vegetables an easy target for hungry deer.
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The original deer management program plan created two designated areas (in the woods around the village’s industrial park and in the woods around Gordon Nauman dog park) where they’d allow people to hunt deer during archery deer season. Only a limited number of people would receive permits to take part in this, and there would be a quota in terms of how many deer they could shoot.
For more information about the village of Howard’s deer management program proposal, please click here. As stated earlier, it is likely that many of the provisions of the program will change.
One resident told Local 5 News that he thinks the village needs to increase its deer quota and up the number of places where hunting will be allowed for this deer management program to have any chance at success.
Not everybody feels like shooting deer is the best way to get things under control in Howard.
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“We’ve lived here for 25 years and work from home, I’ve enjoyed looking out the window and seeing the deer every day,” said Howard resident Pam Hale. “Part of the experience is the wildlife. If I don’t want to have wildlife, I can go live in an apartment. I want to have the wildlife, I want to have deer.”
Hale said she uses deer spray on her plants and it has done the trick. She said she’d rather see the deer relocated than killed.
“Subdivisions went up where apple trees used to be, acorn trees used to be, open fields used to be, and woods were cut down. There’s nowhere for these deer to go,” she said.
